Drive

poetry by Alex Guarco

I told you I was lost in you,

like I was some one-hit-wonder radio lookalike,

only I

realize now that my misplacement was little more

than a feeling of place,

a feeling I’ve been waiting years to experience,

a knowing of where I was at the time,

a knowing that

there, with you,

was where

I belonged.

I wouldn’t go out and say it was love,

it was just whatever

two 19-year-olds are capable of

on a Wednesday night,

parked too far away from the drive-in screen

to see any the movie.

You know,

I’ve brought other girls to that drive-in,

in the same car,

laid down on the same couple of pillows,

even thrown the same blanket over us

when the second movie started.

The difference is,

no matter how many rows back we were,

with them, I always watched the movie,

and if we touched underneath the blanket,

or if they rolled their head over and smiled to me,

I’d smile back, squeeze their hand a little tighter

because I knew that’s what I was supposed to do.

But with you, when the intermission was over,

I let our bare legs get cold,

not really sure what to do,

like that blanket wasn’t even there.

So I rolled my head towards yours,

and we both

squeezed our hands tighter,

both

knowing that’s what we were supposed to do.

And after

catching each other in the act,

realizing we were too busy knowing and

too far from enjoying,

we got lost,

unsure what to do next, but

it was okay because for the first time

we found life.

---

Alex Guarco is a sophomore creative writing major at Susquehanna University. He's president of SU Slam Poetry and a member of the Ultimate Frisbee and Club Volleyball teams.  Alex has appeared in Outrageous Fortune, Variance, Tomfoolery Review, and Essay.

Also by Alex Gaurco: 8:30

Untitled

by poetry Amber L. Cook


When I emptied the contents of your skull

                           I was monogrammed into
synapses you would never use,
                              synapses that I snapped
like green beans, fresh
   from the garden bordered by mesh wire,


where I planted you as a seed
                            & covered you with soil &
gave you water like you’d bud
into a color other than
                                      red overlapping red
down your temple where I traced


my fingers in lines trying to map
                    my way to words you left sitting in
the saliva around your ceramic mug,
                                       eggs laying stagnant in
rain from weeks before,
                                           drying up in the sun.

I do not imagine the mesh wire to outline
                                  the perimeter of your body
or the preparatory paint recoating the outside of
your white house
                       where you would leave her alone
in photograph after photograph


for the photo album she kept
                                      on the nightstand and I
do not admit to your exiting before
entering, do not admit to your wound still emptying
                                                            out years after, 
or years before I could capsulate you in my palm.

---

Amber L. Cook is a senior creative writing and English secondary-education major from Long Valley, New Jersey. She has a dual passion for modifying the poetic form and teaching her students. She has formerly been published in The Susquehanna Review, Prick of the Spindle, Outrageous Fortune, and Rivercraft. Her plans include getting an MFA in Poetry sometime in the near future.

Coming next week: poetry by Alex Guarco

8:30

poetry by Alex Guarco

I ask him what he thinks Hell is,

if he’s ever thought about it.  He says,

an eternity with your mother.

laughing, he sinks into the couch,

sips from his glass, Jameson, Coke

thumb-clicking his way through our evening,

sinking, sipping low until his eyes follow suit

as predicted.

---

Alex Guarco is a sophomore creative writing major at Susquehanna University. He's president of SU Slam Poetry and a member of the Ultimate Frisbee and Club Volleyball teams.  Alex has appeared in Outrageous Fortune, Variance, Tomfoolery Review, and Essay.

Coming next week: fiction by Aaron Abel

Fever Dreams Pt. 2

by Kim Stoll

You woke at 2:46,

kicked the sheets from

your sweat-glossed legs,

to tell me about a dream

where a fish floats belly-up,

reborn under thin sheets of ice.

You were that fish.

Moved so painfully slow,

pressed your skeleton against

your flesh and could not escape.

Then you were snagged

and yanked to the surface,

gutted and scraped of

all your scales on

a mossy table.

Your eyes rolled between

the floorboard and back

into the lake

where the other fish

pecked away at them.

---

Kim Stoll is a junior creative writing major with a minor in film studies. Her poetry has previously been published in RiverCraft and her chapbook, Through a Pinhole.

Coming next week: poetry by Alex Gaurco

Words That Are Close

poetry by Melissa Goodrich

plover, seal, pledge, place, stent, flush, flight

a lover is not a bird

near shore, short-tailed

with long

pointed wings

nor the sea

torpedo-shaped

with four

flippers, nor a sealant

a ledge is not something

promised, bound by

promise, the

promise to give

nor lace a room,

region, or part

devoted

to a special purpose

a tent

is not a surgical device

to hold tissue

in place, as inside

a vessel of blood, keeping

the vessel open

to lush is not to glow

or be washed

out sudden with a flow

of water,

or startled

up from cover, said

of birds

nor is light a fleeting

as from

danger, a soaring

above, a set of stairs between

landings

---

Melissa Goodrich has been PANKed and Routed.  She's served as the co-editor of The Susquehanna Review and the poetry editor of RiverCraft the past two years.  As a senior, she's started becoming nostalgic, phoning old grade-school English teachers, exhuming retired poems...it has all of it been a pleasure.

Coming next week: nonfiction by Emily Northey

(This is a love poem for Ally.)

poetry by Elizabeth Deanna Morris

Bee Sting
And your tongue of bees stung
me in between and that’s all my clit
is now but a swelling from when you
kamikazied yourself before retreating
further within me to your hive
where you would die and now
I carry you with me, calcium
& amber; when I dip into my honey comb
these days, I lose myself in the buzzing
in the space behind my right ear.


(Ally)
these days
i carry you with me
and now
you retreat
a swelling
and your tongue

---

Elizabeth Deanna Morris is soon to be a graduate of Susquehanna University with a Bachelors of the Arts in Creative Writing.  She has been published in Variance, RiverCraft, The Susquehanna Review, and Transformations.  She is the poetry winner of Lazy Eye Press's Fall 2009 Chapbook Contest.  She also finds time to blog about writing.  She loves knitting, spinning, and other domestic activities.  She often dreams her poetry before she writes it.  She isn't sure if this means that she's cheating or working even as she sleeps.

To:

poetry by Staci Eckenroth

Midnights dissolve into mid-mornings and

sleepless stumble. Through hours of fog,

driving down well-lit highways, they hope for

illusions that others are as forgotten in the blanketing

thick enough to blackout histories, like

memories of a boy’s body. Posed

in his casket while a girl in the corner steals

tissues and prayer cards, stuffing them in fistfuls

down her pockets. She keeps him as a reminder.

I ask, of what? She answers, of losing,

and fading scars from answers injected into

veins. My mother begs between inhales

of her cigarette, words hanging with smoke

trails: don’t ever do this to me.

But when sunlight spreads through maples, I

watch the sky move from black to purple to blue

like gradations of pixels. My grayscale eyes

knew these colors once, but now I only see cloud coverage

pushing the memory of his calloused fingertips

running over my hipbone from my mind. I still feel

the flutter of his eyelashes on my shoulder blade,

and goose bumps pimple across my skin

in waves of passion or loneliness

or misunderstanding. There was no note,

no one worth mentioning, but the sleepless

continue because we promised we would.

---

Staci Eckenroth is a senior creative writing major at Susquehanna University. She's obsessed with notebooks, the color yellow, and how memory works.  She has been previously published in RiverCraft, The Blue Route, and The Susquehanna Review.
 

Coming next week: fiction by Rob Rotell